How the Moon Works

By Matt Rowan

In How the Moon Works, globally underappreciated author Matt Rowan, strives for literary greatness by teaching us all how exactly the moon works and fails heroically. He blames "the establishment," claiming that this book is his way to "make you all pay," but really he just hopes you buy multiple copies so he can get that new Schwi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cobalt Press
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781941462232

Book preview

Copyright © 2021

Print ISBN: 978-1-941462-24-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-941462-23-2

Cover and book design by Andrew Keating.

Cobalt Press

Denver, CO

cobaltreview.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in review, without written permission from the author/ publisher.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to actual people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

For all inquiries, including requests for review materials, please contact [e-mail].

For Joyce Derwin, one of the kindest people I’ve ever had the privilege to call a friend

contents

No Me Say It

Grizzly 25’s

Eyesore of a Thing

How the Moon Works

Not the Actions of a Hero Who Must Be Nice

Enthusiasm for the Final Climactic Showdown

Blurring It All So Clearly

The Walk-In-Their-Footsteps Historical Footsteps Museum

New Slim

Watch Him Squeeze Stuff

A Copy of a Copy is Never as Good

Vetron

how the moon works

What majesty, what joy, what colors, what pangloss, said the announcers as they opened to Handle-Hands’ segment. It filled your mind’s eye with images of 1980s soap opera intros and the loving visage of famous-but-not-too-famous soap celebrity Ray MacDonnell, big eyebrowed and winsome grinning. Handle-Hands, himself, had something about the very same Ray MacDonnell to his facial appearance, and he induced nostalgia with his winsomeness when he grinned into the wand-like microphone they fixed in place to one of his appendages. People reported being stirred to reminisce mid-viewing and then feeling transported back to the summer cottages of their youth, swimming in adjacent pond and roasting marshmallows in the open air, as though both experiences were happening simultaneously while also viewing.

Handle-Hands eventually became accustomed to his celebrity on Home Shopping Network’s Welcome to Products That Will Scare You. His role was horrifying host.

People liked to laugh at how Handle-Hands struggled to hold things, specifically products of many shapes and many sizes. Everyone was always grabbing Handle-Hands’ hands, which were handles, and telling him that he was the doorway to their heart. They explained that his manner, in addition to something else they couldn’t quite place, made him their favorite salesman of all time, on TV or anywhere. He never knew how to respond.

His handles were two different kinds of knobs, one brass and the other crystal. They weren’t like hooks or something on a pirate. They weren’t foreign. They were part of his body. He’d feel it if they got hurt. He felt it when people turned them, especially the overzealous people who turned them much harder than was ever required. You could see him wince, and in that wince he seemed to call upon a much larger segment of kinder-gentler humanity to magically will itself into existence. And oh how the imbeciles would struggle, gurgling a bit and then sneering at his handle hands, which were knobs, and grabbing them more vigorously and turning them more vigorously, sometimes honking as they did so, too.

It’s a real pleasure, Mr. Handle-Hands—an honor! Honor is all mine!! they’d say, grinding their molars during the struggle with his knobs, never noticing how their human hands were agonizing poor Handle-Hands. He was polite and never mentioned the agony they put him through. It was unclear, really, why the people would grab him so vigorously, feel such a need to turn his handles with such ferocity. He was not a door and turning harder would no sooner open him up to them, but they turned all the harder, as society had seemingly trained them to do.

What horror would visit the man who hosted Welcome to Products That Will Scare You in consistent waves of fan fervor.

His hosting duties mainly entailed attempting to juggle whatever product was being sold at that particular moment in TV time. He was supposed to fail. The products were supposed to fall, but the products could not be shown breaking, if they did break. So they always shot Handle-hands from the above the waist. Ta-da! someone would say, while the broadcast displayed an unbroken, previously recorded image of the product.

He knew why he did it. One reason was the obvious need for money. Another was the not-obvious fascination he had with some form of renown—even if minor, as this most certainly was minor. The third and most important reason was for his bundle at home, with her own tiny knobs, which were very different from his own, both white. He worried about what would happen as she got older, and perhaps recognizable to viewers. Would her knobs be as wrenched and turned mercilessly as his were, all too often?

He fought desperately to keep her a secret—came home, met with the nanny, changed her diaper, fed her dinner, polished her knobs. Her porcelain knobs. In every characteristic of beauty, she was superior to him. And so precious, so fragile! He could not forget how fragile she was. He was as careful carrying her as he’d ever been with anything, carrying her like his own existence somehow would be snuffed out if ever he loosened his hold. The sun squelched, the universe emptied into oblivion.

He vowed to protect every part of her. While he was still living and breathing and able to cradle her in his handled arms, no one would ever grip her away from him.

Then came the introduction of one particular Product That Will Scare You: the No Me Say It.

The No Me Say It was introduced to the buying public on a rainy Saturday. The whole country was simultaneously experiencing rain. It was great for sales. People were in front of their televisions looking for things to buy, especially things that scared them. If it actually harmed them, all the better.

The No Me Say It was sandwiched between two other products that Handle-Hands’ bosses had higher opinions of going into the day’s selling. The first was an object that looked a lot like a soccer ball and was about the same size but with electrical sockets inside of which you plugged metal rods, and you plugged its cord into a household electric socket—rubber gloves for fitting metal rods into plugs that were not included. The Shocker Jockey. Things that forced an electric current through people always sold well.

The second was a Build-Your-Own Troll that came to life after you finished constructing it, and, alive, would attempt to singe you with its singe-stick. Then, once singed, the troll would cut you, cut you a lot. Cut you where it hurts. It would cut you with a machine called The Paper-Cut Machine. Included with the purchase of a Build-Your-Own Troll.

By comparison, the No Me Say It was unremarkable, and that’s what made it so remarkable.

When Handle-Hands had first got his start in the business of home shopping, he had a mentor, Robes Johannasen, whose one crucial piece of advice had remained with Handle-Hands all these years: One day, from what reaches, depths, what have you, will come a thing that sells better than all the things you’ve ever sold. That thing has a life of its own. Don’t get in the way of that thing or it just might be the end of you. It might even suck you dry.

Robes’ thing was an expensive electronic leech measuring three feet in length, about one in width. He had a very straightforward sense of the world. Few corpses were so desiccated as his when they found him dead on his dressing-room floor.

The No Me Say It surprised Handle-Hands. He didn’t really think much about the small and strange device, until he was forced to, because of its meteoric success. People stopped him on the streets about the No Me Say It, saying they thought it was just junk, but then it saved their lives with terror, the skillful implementation of slow-dripping, methodical terror. They didn’t even bother to grab Handle-Hands’ knobs anymore. His knobs were so clean, so unblemished and germ-free, even after a long day’s work and being out in the world as a recognizable television person. The experience was brand new to him, not that he minded.

But the No Me Say It, it wouldn’t let him sleep.

The device was simple. Whenever you tried to say anything, it would caw, via its speakers: "NO, ME SAY IT!" As time went on, and you continued your ownership of it, the noise would get progressively louder. And that might be fine, if it ever stopped getting louder. It made your eyes bleed, after a short while. After a short while it would react to every noise you made, every breath, every swallow, every snore and snort, whether superfluous or necessary.

And even if you were able to rest, your rest was restless. The No Me Say It appeared in your dreams like a winged serpent, a screeching horror on the worst side of a succubus. And even if you were able to rest the rest of the restless, your eyes still bled from the noise, bled closed.

It was a massive hit. You couldn’t listen to the radio without hearing the cacophony of the No Me Say It, mainly because your own No Me Say It would exceed the sound of the music, overwhelming the volume of any music or ambiance or whatever else was producing sound, naturally. A few satisfied customers’ heads exploded. In actual fact. Their heads blew up. So too did melons. The produce section of a busy grocery store was one of the worst places to have your No Me Say It. Fresh, ripened melon, unexploded, began fetching a hefty price.

People loved that the No Me Say It had the power to follow you everywhere, whether you wanted it to or not.

And they all realized quite abruptly it was Handle-Hands who was to thank. They raced to Handle-Hands like a horde of hard-charging, single-minded livestock. Now, rather than be ignored and kept safe from further harm by people’s infatuation with a particular product he’d sold, Handle-Hands was their singular object of worship. He had given them the No Me Say It. He had given them something so clearly apart from want, so clearly and in every way the embodiment of need. The need for something so terribly true.

Handle-Hands was soon overwhelmed by the abusive praise. He fled. He remembered Johannasen’s other words, There’s nothing doing so why try? Let them. Fierce shouts. Don’t. The rubber pillow. I’m just trying to be understood. It was important to note that these were words Johannasen had said very near the end, when his total blood loss was near its apex. Something about his words, though, made Handle-Hands think of his daughter. She had never been gifted a No Me Say It. He hoped she’d be able to sleep well without it, but there was Handle-Hands’s own No Me Say It to consider, the noise of which was enough to keep everyone in a single household awake for the entirety of their lives.

He felt the weariness of his body closing in, the lack of sleep suffocating him—delirious, but aware enough of what was truly important.

The horde caught up to him on Culver Drive, but he’d lost them again by the time he got to his neighborhood and the street he lived on. He worried they’d be waiting for him there. He was surprised that his adoring fans, whose effusive thank yous were only exceeded in decibel by the sound of the peoples’ No Me Say Its, were not teeming to greet him. It was possible they were hiding, but the No Me Say It made hiding difficult, if not completely impossible. There was only the sound of his own No Me Say It shouting over his most necessary and automatic bodily functions, a slow trickle of blood down his face.

Inside his home, Handle-Hands noticed immediately how much cooler the temperature was. The world had been something like superheated by the increased noise. It was spreading its ubiquity to other sensations. It might have been stimulating an end to all things, but probably strictly an end to all comfort. Life would go on, irritably.

For now, at least it was cool and quiet in Handle-Hands’s home. He went up the stairs to Missy’s room. There she was, resting. She had slept! Her nanny was nearby, seated on a rocking chair, reading. She signaled to him: Handle-Hands. Quiet. Let her sleep. Let her enjoy this little comfort while it lasts. The nanny looked profoundly uncomfortable.

Handle-Hands backed quietly from his daughter’s room.

The sun, previously shining into the living room, was now blotted out. And there was a tremor, a tremble, slight at first, but increasing in intensity. There was a hill some football fields from Handle-Hands’s neighborhood. On that hill had risen a statue. It was his own likeness. It was Handle-Hands. There was the teeming mass of adulating fans. On the hill. They’d hauled the enormous statue of Handle-Hands up the hill. The noise was deafening. They must have waited for him to go inside his home. They’d had to have been collectively holding their breath with fierce patience and at some personal risk, waiting for the right moment to raise the statue and begin their applause. And while they were now doing precisely that, No Me Say Its were drowning out the noise of their applause. His own No Me Say It had sounded. So had the nanny’s. Missy was crying out, awoken, stricken from comfort. This infuriated Handle-Hands. How infuriating! He forced his No Me Say It from his pocket with the nubs of his handles, let it fall to the floor. He began to trample it with his feet. It would not break, not this high-quality product. Not so easily. He knocked over other items previously showcased on Welcome to Products That Will Scare You: the Mouth Television, a television that would try to gum on you—it didn’t have teeth!—when you weren’t watching it, and sometimes when you were, if you weren’t giving the watching your all, and sometimes when you were giving it your all, because it was a product that kept its users on their toes; the Dear Head of a Deer, which floated after you disembodied, trying to gore with its sword antlers, because it had sword blades that were bent and shaped like jagged antlers for antlers; the Wearing a Glass Necklace, which would get progressively tighter and sharper over the course of a good, fun night out on the town; The Bat, which was both a baseball bat and an animal bat and would flutter its wings every time you swung it at something, simultaneously putting you at the risk of acquiring rabies and hitting dingers. Lots of other items, too, all of which broke easily. But his No Me Say It did not, as though it were refusing, as it shouted "NO, ME SAY IT!" amid the destruction.

And while Handle-Hands’s living room shook from his anger and desperation, the ground outside likewise continued to shake from the noise of the people and the noise of their No Me Say Its. They’d become so voracious, lost in their fandom, panicking with elation. They wouldn’t mean to, but they might soon inadvertently destroy something beautiful in their haste and the scrum to press themselves against their favorite TV celebrity.

It didn’t come to pass quite that way, though. The statue was not secured in its position, and so a blast of wing tipped the visage of Handle-Hands, both of his knobs raised in triumph to the sky. Now falling, falling and